Today Voat pushed an update meant to address three things: Vote manipulation, Archiving Data, and Feature Prep. I will keep this announcement as short as possible.

Vote Manipulation

I have been researching vote farming and brigading for about a month. And honestly, I’m pissed off. What I have found is simply unacceptable. These actions destroy Voat’s credibility and value and will be actively developed against. The following actions have been taken to increase vote integrity:

Archiving Data

Archived and Deleted Submissions, and their comments, can no longer be voted on.

Vote counts are using individual vote counts instead of the up/down totals on comments/submissions*

Users with High SCP/CCP should see an improvement accessing Voat when data isn’t in cache

* Please note that all point values will drop because of this new logic. Prior logic counted up/down totals on submissions and comments instead of the individual votes themselves (it was more performant this way). When a user deletes their account, their votes are removed but the up/down totals are not adjusted. Since new logic uses individual vote counts everyone’s points will be dropping unfortunately. Just heads up. @Atko was hit the worst of all, poor guy.

Future Feature Prep

Schema changes were made to prepare for the re-release of Sets (grouping of multiple subverses). Voat will begin set development next week as we have designed many upcoming features upon this basic structural concept including categorization, new user centric functionality (more info soon), expanded and more functional blocking capabilities, and the concept of “following” users who publish feeds (more info soon).

Naming conventions and indexing has been cleaned up in database.

Warning to Vote Brigadiers

I will shortly be banning hundreds of obvious alt accounts used to farm/brigade at Voat. While researching this problem, I noticed that no one is really innocent, meaning that we have both obvious farming/brigading going on but we also have this behavior from good solid users too. It is for this reason that I am not retroactively banning any accounts other than the obvious ones mentioned above.

From this point forward, if you brigade another users’ content your account will be banned.

Consider this fair warning that brigading and manipulating votes is no longer tolerated at Voat.

I have an idea: GET RID OF THE FUCKING UP AND DOWNVOTES AND LET A GODDAMN CONVERSATION HAPPEN, FOR THE SWEET EVERLOVING MOTHER OF FUCK. Copypasta time.

There is one main difference between Reddit and /pol/: equality.

On Reddit, you are forced to make a username to contribute. While you don’t have to connect it to an e-mail, you have to do so to comment more than once per few minutes. So, really, you have to connect it to an e-mail. This creates an identity that a user develops over time and craves to make “important.”

All the individual identities on Reddit crave one thing: Upvotes–for comments and posts. This means that a Reddit user is willing to sell a part of who they really are in the quest for more positive votes. This identity is no longer a true representation of who they really are (were). It is a pseudo-reality that only exists in the world of Reddit. Their ideas, comments, postings, and even language has been influenced and changed all for the sake of the coveted upward pointed arrow.

/pol/ is void of this. I can be who I want to be, post what I want to post, and say what I want to say without having to think about what you fucks think. Your opinions don’t do anything. /pol/ has given other users no way to devalue my identity. Reddit, by its nature, explicitly gives other users a way to devalue who and what you really are, what you really think, and what you really want to say. Reddit, while claiming to be for “content,” is really against it. One poster on Reddit even showed a part in the basic coding of Reddit’s popularity system where votes over time earn the “front page” status quickly. What gets looked at more over a short period of time: the interesting post about something everyone should know, or some stupid fucking cat? The cat, because it’s easier to see, easier to read, and easier to process. It’s a joke.

Sure, Reddit has some positives, but it all boils down to this: Reddit allows other users to have the power to alter your way of thinking for the sake of favor among them. /pol/ does not. Oh, and one more thing. Reddit’s administrators censor and delete anything with which they do not agree. Not only are other users altering your beliefs, the site owners are, as well.

While I can see the perks to not having voats at times it is nice to have the crap hidden away at the bottom so you don't have to see the people just listing insults because they can. or to have a simple correction to the headline drug to the top so you know when people are working off a wrong assumption from the title, especially nice if you haven't read the linked content yet or can't access it behind firewalls.

/pol/ and other image boards also make everyone a nameless figure, who you cannot ever possibly connect with, which is great for those without a sense of personhood or the sense of self. They're also inefficient for searching for content, and their content deletes over time when it hasn't been interacted in a while or it hits the post/bump limit making it even more enificent.